After several months of lay off, Former employees of Twitter Africa’s office in Accra are yet to receive their severance packages.
According to the
former staff of the social media company, management have refused to pay their
bill for entitlements since they were laid off this year.
In a report by
CNN, though the former employees agreed to a 3-month severance package, the
company is yet to pay.
“They literally
ghosted us,” one former Twitter Africa employee told CNN.
“Although
Twitter has eventually settled former staff in other locations, Africa staff
have still been left in the lurch despite us eventually agreeing to specific
negotiated terms.”
The former
employees say they reluctantly agreed to the severance package without
benefits, even though it was less than what colleagues elsewhere received.
“Twitter was
non-responsive until we agreed to the three months because we were all so
stressed and exhausted and tired of the uncertainty, reluctant to take on the
extra burdens of a court case so we felt we had no choice but to settle,”
another former employee told CNN.
The dozen or so
team members were laid off just four days after the social network opened a
physical office in Accra last November.
Some of them
said they had moved to Ghana from other African nations, and depended on their
jobs at Twitter to support their legal status in the country.
Twitter
reportedly owes over $500 million in severance packages to over a thousand
employees it fired months ago.
Courtney
McMillian, who oversaw Twitter’s employee benefits programs as its “head of
total rewards” before she was laid off in January, filed the proposed class
action in San Francisco federal court.
McMillian claims
that under a severance plan created by Twitter in 2019, most workers were
promised two months of their base pay plus one week of pay for each full year
of service if they were laid off.
Senior employees
such as McMillian were owed six months of base pay, according to the lawsuit.
But Twitter only
gave laid-off workers at most one month of severance pay, and many of them did
not receive anything, McMillian claims.
Twitter laid off
more than half of its workforce as a cost-cutting measure after Elon Musk
acquired the company in October.
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